"I so didn't want to be a poet," Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. "I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn't believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me."

But in the end "I couldn't resist," she said. "It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased."

Dana Gioia, a poet and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was an early supporter of Ms. Ryan's work, describing her as the "thoughtful, bemused, affectionate, deeply skeptical outsider."

"She would certainly be part of the world if she could manage it," he said. "She has certain reservations. That is what makes her like Dickinson in some ways."

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